The foreboding forest
by RoseScor90
Summary: Written for the Phobia challenge. Circles around Theodore Nott!


**Disclaimer : I don't own any of the Harry Potter characters…**

A/n: This one's been written for the Phobia challenge. The phobia was – Hylophobia – fear of forests.

Her Mum had warned him not to go. So naturally, he hadn't listened. And now he was paying the price.

He had been amazed at the albino peacocks that had danced before his stunned eyes at the Malfoy Manor. He had seen them retreat into the forest, but his mother had been unreasonable again, refusing to send him to look at them.

Running through the dense forest, seven year old Theodore Nott slipped on the thick undergrowth and fell on a rather sharp rock, losing conscious instantly.

When he woke up a few hours later, it was pitch dark around him. He couldn't even see his own palm. He began listening to the sounds around him, hoping that some one would come searching for him.

But alas, all he could hear was the distant howl. It wasn't a full moon, so he knew it couldn't be a werewolf, but, he had once heard about werewolves who could change even when it wasn't full moon.

Just then, the moon came out of the clouds and he could see his surroundings, though Theodore at once wished that he hadn't been able to do so.

All around him were trees whose tops were invisible to him. They appeared like the portraits of banshees he had seen at his house's attics.

The smell around him was of moss and decaying leaves, along with the smell of water, which suggested that a water source was nearby, but Theo dare not move towards it, for fear of what creature would await him there.

The clouds crossed over his head, covering him in darkness again.

He had hoped for the clouds to move away, but, they stayed, and a slight drizzle began to splatter on his face.

"Ah!" he hissed, as he felt the cool water fall on his head, which he just remembered got hit on a rock.

He looked around, as if wanting to find the offending rock and take revenge on it.

Suddenly, he heard the sound of breathing quite close to him.

Exactly at that moment, the clouds passed, and in front of him, at a mere distance of three feet, was a snarling werewolf, its yellow teeth barred and its breathing labored.

A scream of fear was all that came out of his mouth before he had fainted for the second time in three hours.

Remembering the incident, Theodore slacked in his steps as a sharp sense of déjà vu surrounded him.

He had been lucky back then. It had been Greyback who had been in his senses and had recognized him and brought him back.

He stood before the forest now. Not the same one he had fainted in ten years ago, but a more perilous version of it, near Hogwarts.

Once he entered the forest, this time, no one would come looking for him. He wasn't going in there voluntarily. He wasn't going in search of an albino either.

What waited him behind those bunches of trees, was Voldemort. His destiny.

But, he was afraid. Not of the evil that resided within them. He had decided long ago that if he couldn't postpone meeting the Dark Lord for ever, he would say to his face that he wouldn't join and die.

No, it was the path that feared him. The trees, the forest. The dampness that was some how ever present. The throbbing of life within it. The dangers it presented.

There was a reason he had failed his OWL Care of Magical Creatures and Herbology.

And so, as the students who were going to join the Dark Side, Slytherins mostly, took the detour from Hogsmeade, he stood in front of it with a blank expression, until some one shook him.

"What are you doing here, Theo. I thought you were going home?"

"Huh? Yeah, I was but, no one would be there"

"Theo, it's alright. May be they'll…"

"They'll what Daphne? Realize what they are doing is stupid? That their son betrayed them and that they'd have to kill him for it?"

"They won't. Definitely…not their only son!"

"You don't know them. You haven't seen them speak about him. They'd have killed each other if one of them hadn't joined. I mean little to nothing to them except a possible successor to their place in the Death Eater circle. When they see that that won't happen, that I'll be of no use to them…"

Daphne stood by him, not knowing what to say. She couldn't console him that the light side might win and his parents would be sentenced. No, that'd be cruel.

And definitely not after he had helped her get over the murder of her parents a year back.

She couldn't tell him to join the Death Eaters, some thing not even she believed in.

"Let's go to my house, Theo. It will be safer there. Your parents don't know the location and even if they do, they won't guess that you'd be with us. Astoria's already gone there. What do you say?"

"But, I don't want to put you two in any more danger than you already are in!"

"The only danger we aren't facing now is being burnt by a dragon and I don't think you can convince one to do us in. Come on!"

He removed his sight from the forest for the first time and looked at her.

"But, we have to go through the forest! You know I don't like that!"

"Yes, I do. You know what? This is almost funny! You aren't afraid to go in front of the most evil creature on earth, yet you shudder at the mere thought of a bunch of trees!" her grass green eyes flashed with incredulity for a moment.

"Still…"

"I am with you this time, aren't I? The last time you were lost! Now, we know exactly where we are and precisely where we need to go! We're already running late. If we don't escape now…"

Theo once again looked at the ominous air surrounding the forest and back at Daphne. He had come to a decision.

"Let's go"

As Daphne led him through the forest, her thick curtain of raven hair floating around her, he hoped, rather stupidly and quite foolishly according to him, that the woman who was with him now, would be with him for the rest of his miserable existence.

Looking up, through the canopy of trees, he could see a shining star fall towards the ground, even amidst all the Dementor mist.

A/n: R&R!


End file.
